Contact centers are generally employed by businesses to communicate with their current or potential customers (collectively referred to as customers or end users). Contact centers often employ business representatives, or agents, who are assigned to various incoming and outgoing activities associated with such customers. Incoming activities may include servicing the needs of calling customers, while outgoing activities may include proactively contacting the customers for offering products, conducting surveys, or rendering other services to those customers. An agent may also be engaged in offline activities, which may be referred to as “back office work,” such as completing forms, answering emails, answering letters, taking part in training sessions, or performing other activities that do not involve a real-time interaction with a customer.
Traditional ways for customers and agents to communicate with one another is by telephone, fax, or email. However, recent technological developments have extended the channels of communication to other media such as, for example chat, instant messaging, social networking sites, and the like.
In some contact centers, an incoming or outgoing activity may be assigned to an available agent who is capable of handling the activity as determined, for example, by the agent's level of skill in the related field. In current contact centers, agents are often assigned skills (e.g. based on training they may have received), which may be administratively activated or deactivated to control what activities an agent will handle at any point in time. In addition, contact center administrators or work force management software may establish schedules for each agent based on different criteria such as, for example, labor laws, employment agreements, scheduled vacation times, contact center hours of operation, and the like. The schedules may indicate, for example, the types of activity an agent is to handle and the agent's capacity. With respect to the agent's capacity, the schedule may indicate a number of activities or types of activities that an agent may be assigned to handle concurrently at any point in time.
A contact center administrator may modify an agent's skill or capacity settings and potentially change the agent's utilization during routing of activities. It is desirable to provide similar abilities to an agent. In this regard, it is desirable to provide to an agent the ability to influence his/her utilization in real time during the routing of activities.
Accordingly, what is desired is a system and method for providing to agents engaged in customer activities the ability to express their own preferences with regards to the type of activities they would like to handle, capacity for handling activities, and/or other routing parameters, in real-time.